The Power of Testimony

’TIL WE MEET AGAIN
out the sunlight. The tree and I were made for each other,
and nobody knew the routes up or down the way I did.
It was a sunny winter afternoon in the final days of 1929,
and even though the tree was bare, I knew I was almost
invisible. Below me, the afternoon carried on as usual. In
the distance, streetcars unloaded and restocked their human
cargo, ferrying them in and out of downtown Columbus, a
five-​ cent ride away. Every once in a while, trains passed on
one of the two parallel lines that ran through town.
Though it had been a month since the start of the Great
Depression, I was almost totally unaware of what was going
on in the world. For the eight-​year-​ old me, perched above
the street, everything was just as it was supposed to be. I lay
back and stared at the sky beyond the branches.
There was a breeze, but nothing like the kind of wind
that sometimes blew through my Ohio hometown. On
those gusty days, my friends and I would fashion paper and
sticks into kites and then attach secret messages to the tails
before releasing them to the skies. We’d let the winds take
them higher and higher, eating up the string that unleashed
from our hands until the kites were barely visible. When
we’d had enough of watching the bird-​ sized dots wrestle
in the wind, we’d begin the long task of reeling them back
in. Finally, with arms and hands aching, we’d examine our
downed kites, eager to see which messages had been taken
by the clouds.
Lying on the thick boughs of the beech, I thought about
the skies. But that day I wasn’t thinking about kites; I was
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